Charlotte DuClare

Name: Charlotte “Charlie” DuClare

Gender: Female

Age: 18

Grade: 12th

School: Bayview Secondary School

Hobbies and Interests: Charlie's a member of the cheerleading squad, a pursuit she enjoys both for its own sake and for the friends it affords her. She's danced ballet frequently since a kid, and has shifted focuses to jazz and contemporary styles starting in freshman year. Charlie enjoys partying with her friends quite a bit, but nowadays feels slightly uncomfortable around some of the excesses.

Appearance: Charlie is a petite girl (5'3”, 125 lbs.) with a slim figure, small breasts, and a rather delicate, feminine type of beauty to her. Most of her facial features are generally small and flat, especially her nose and ears, but her grayish-blue eyes are rather large and wide. The overall impression is that Charlie looks rather young, innocent, and naïve, leading friends to jokingly call her “jailbait” every so often even if she's among the oldest kids in the class. Charlie's smile in particular is very warm, wide, and infectious, and her generally sunny disposition means she shows it often.

Charlie's hair is a dark brown, and though she's tried several styles over the course of high school, she's currently settled on a style combed straight and close to her face. She wears her bangs long, just above her eyebrows, and the rest of her hair falls past her face but ends before her shoulders, with her ears usually poking out through the sides of her hair.

She usually keeps up with latest fashions, with some amount of disdain for and reluctance to wear particularly risque clothing. She typically comes to school wearing a fairly tight t-shirt and short short during summer months, often having a pair of sunglasses resting on top of her head but rarely actually wearing them. She wears a moderate amount of makeup, preferring pink lipstick and occasionally rocking a bit of a raccoon eye (though she's gradually cut down on this recently).

Biography: Charlie grew up in a rather mannered, quiet house, the only daughter of a successful payroll executive at a local investment bank and his trophy wife. Her parents are generally caring souls, and went out of their way to sign Charlie up for various extracurricular programs without pressuring her to choose any in particular. Charlie is very thankful for this fact, as it led to her getting involved in her current passions of dance and cheerleading at an early age. However, despite her parents' generally good intentions and support of her hobbies, Charlie was always left with the sensation that her home life was a rather boring one. Accordingly, she began to act out and seek excitement in school from an early age to compensate for her hum-drum home life.

Charlie learned throughout grade school that certain definitions of “acting out” got one in trouble rather frequently, so she generally abstained from those. Instead of blatantly breaking rules, she took joy in gossiping about less popular girls and insulting them. Charlie realized very quickly she had a talent for burns, and that while certain people would obviously call her “catty” and “bitchy” for the things she said, she could ingrain herself in popular circles by expertly dissing the usual targets of those circles. She generally indulged in these tendencies for the fun of it and for the acceptance it got her, rather than out of malice for those she was mean to. Though she played her fair share of pranks and made her share of face-to-face insults, she'd generally prefer if her insults never got past the ears of her friends so as not to hurt anyone intentionally. Naturally, word would still get out, and this only gave her a reputation for talking behind people's backs.

Upon arriving in high school, Charlie found that her talents and personality made her a natural fit for the Bayview cheerleading squad, and quickly befriended most of the squad members. Throughout this time, her mean tendencies increased and she lost many of her qualms about being mean to people directly. Charlie justified herself by saying that she was only trying to have fun, that nobody was really getting hurt, and that if people took themselves so seriously as to get mad at her, they deserved what was coming. Charlie circa freshman and sophomore year could be charitably described as a very fun-loving, vivacious, mischievous girl, and perhaps more accurately described as someone who was desperate for acceptance and found this acceptance by being a total bitch.

This all changed gradually over the course of her year-long relationship with one Julian Avery. Julian, with whom she hooked up because he was a handsome, popular guy who seemed like he had a good sense of humor, started doing something Charlie wasn't entirely used to: he'd call her out on her actions. What surprised Charlie the most was that the complaining wasn't being done by the victim, and that it wasn't really "complaining" at all: Julian would do his best to simply make her realize that she'd been acting like a selfish bitch. Despite what seemed like good intent on his part, and despite the fact that Charlie was gradually coming across to Julian's way of thinking, she eventually decided that she didn't need a preacher for a boyfriend, and the two parted on fairly amicable terms. Julian's advice did resonate with her, however, and over time she came to realize how petty her former actions had been. To this day, Charlie and Julian are good friends, probably better than they ever were when they were actually dating.

Unfortunately, while Julian's influence was enough to start Charlie on the way to becoming a better person, it wasn't nearly enough to seal the deal. Charlie probably should try to move away from her crowd of arrogant and snide popular friends, or try to help them the way Julian helped her, but she really has no intention of doing so. Charlie still ultimately fears rejection, and wants to keep the friendships she has. She worries that if she tries to moralize on them, she'll come across as self-righteous and hypocritical, so she for the most part goes along with whatever malice occurs. Moreover, she actually likes her friends, partly in spite of their nature and partly because of it.

Additionally, Charlie herself is still far from angelic: while her morals are noticeably more solid than they used to be, one can think of her as someone whose judgment hasn't caught up her conscience. Charlie will still often do or say the hurtful things she used to, still "for the laffs", largely because she still finds them funny and can't exactly contain herself that well. The difference is that now, she genuinely feels sorry afterwards and even tries to make amends. Naturally, many of these attempts come across as insincere to the recipients, though her reputation outside her own circle is gradually improving as she continues to contain herself better.

Advantages: Charlie has a loyal group of friends she can easily ally with, and her extensive training in dance and cheerleading means that she's in great physical shape. She's used to people—typically the recipients of her insults and pranks—disliking her, so she carries the requisite ability to suspect others for a game of SotF.

Disadvantages: Her current desire to reform means she'll probably be reluctant to kill to at least some extent. Moreover, opinions of her are generally not very high outside of her social circle. If her attempts to reform have won her over to some people, they've also convinced others that she's phony and isn't to be trusted.

Designated Number: Female Studen No. 071

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Designated Weapon: Handheld Mirror

Conclusion: Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the deadest of them all? How fitting that a bratty little teenager gets such an object. Take a long, hard look, Girl 071. See that? Unless you shape up, that pretty little face of yours won't make it to an open casket funeral.

'The above biography is as written by Jonny. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.'

Evaluations
Handled by: Jonny

Kills: None

Killed By: Naoko Raidon

Collected Weapons: Handheld Mirror (assigned weapon)

Allies: Dave Morrison, Isabel Guerra, Helen Wilson.

Enemies: None

Mid-game Evaluation:

Post-Game Evaluation:

Memorable Quotes:

Other/Trivia

 * Charlotte was the very first character to be rolled in V4, however she was heroed by Daniel Vaughan

Threads
Below is a list of threads that contain Charlotte, in chronological order.

V4:
 * The Outsider
 * Time Is Not On Our Side
 * Day of the Dove
 * Faraday's Cages
 * The House of the Rising Sun
 * Could Have Been Worse
 * No Such Thing as a Perfect Plan
 * Altering the Deal
 * Lies, lies, lies
 * Failing to Reappear

Your Thoughts
''Whether you were a fellow handler in SOTF or just an avid reader of the site, we'd like to know what you thought about Charlotte Duclare. What did you like, or dislike, about the character? Let us know here!''
 * Charlie was Jonny's least flashy character, and was probably his least recognized and appreciated for that reason. Certainly, she doesn't come up nearly as often as Julian and Jeremy in discussions of standout characters from V4. I personally feel, though, that she was his most successful/highest-quality effort on the whole, largely because she manages to do a very good job of being a realistic and highly flawed character facing the island with very human reactions. Charlie engages with the sheer weirdness of the SOTF situation in a way that few other characters have done so successfully, and she absolutely deserves attention for that.

The first hint that there's more to Charlie than meets the eye comes when one examines the company she kept. Charlie spent nearly her entire game hanging around escape groups. This was cool because it showed, on the one hand, how desperate she was to get out of the SOTF situation and, on the other, how clueless she was about how to go about making that a reality. Charlie is not a leader. Hints of this show up very early on. She's very excited to just sit and talk with people, letting go of the weirdness and badness of the island (without, and this is important, sticking her head in the sand and pretending it's not going on).

Charlie separates from her first escape group, and a large part of that feels to be because she doesn't really mesh with how weird things get there. Their attempts at getting free mean they have to engage with the island in a much more real way than Charlie can take, so she finds another group less set on doing so. In this way, she's a perfect fit for Aaron's plans, because he's not actually moving very strongly towards anything really possible. His control method is feeding his team what they want, and Charlie needs this and the normalcy. This is why she allows herself to be deceived despite clearly knowing better.

This, then, is where things take an interesting turn, because Charlie in her fear and desire for normalcy falls into an unhealthy situation, one where she is engaging in self-deception. She decides to sacrifice safety for normalcy, and that's a decision that is much more conscious with her than many other characters, without being so overt as total denial (which is rarely believable outside the first few minutes/hours of the game). This is also what gets Charlie into a bad situation, eventually leading to her being shot by Raidon.

Charlie's death is a wonderful one because it completes her arc. She finally retrieves some of her normalcy and, because she's dying, she also has to accept the island and the game. She manages to reconcile these things, and to find some peace, and for once a death like that works because it's been set up all game and is really the only way her story could end feel right. - MurderWeasel